On October 29, 1777, the British Column of the Convention Army faced the last remaining major natural obstacle on their march to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The day after their surrender at Saratoga they had crossed the Hudson River. In the tens days that followed they had marched through a corner of Vermont, south to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and then east to Northampton, on the west bank of the Connecticut River.
Rivers were a formidable obstacle to travelers in the eighteenth century, especially an army numbering in the thousands which included soldiers (and some of their wives and children) marching on foot, officers on horseback, and horse or ox-drawn wagons loaded with personal belongings, equipment and supplies. There was no bridge from Northampton to Hadley, or anywhere else along the Connecticut River in 1777. The first was not completed until 1785, fifty miles upstream, between Walpole, New Hampshire, and Bellows Falls, Vermont. [1]
Crossing a large river was risky in 1777. British Ensign Thomas Anburey noted that on October 18th, when the British column crossed the Hudson River at Stillwater, New York, a horse had become unruly and jumped over the side of their boat, nearly upsetting it. As a result, he wrote: "I nearly lost my baggage and those in the batteaux had a very narrow escape." [2] Sergeant-Major Park Holland of the 5th Massachusetts Regiment recalled that when he was crossing the Mohawk River in late July or early August of 1777: "We had imprudently filled a large, flat-bottomed boat as full of men as it could well hold, when the boat struck a rock and threw most of us overboard. I had my senses perfectly while lying on the bottom of the river for some time, even knew the person who was standing on my body with his head out of the water." Fortunately his companions realized he was missing, and "hooked me up and laid me down as a dead man on the shore...", where in in a few hours he recovered. [3]
According to Alice Morehouse Walker, who also provided us a description of the sword which Burgoyne supposedly gifted to his host (spoiler alert, it didn't happen), once the Convention Army reached Northampton: “Soon there was business at Joseph Kellog’s ferry, where a straggling army of Hessian mercenaries, prisoners of war, waited to be set [sic] over the river.” Walker does not provide a source for her information, or explain why the Germans would have crossed there, when their route of march took them to West Springfield. [4]
Patricia Laurice Ellsworth indicates in her study entitled “Hadley West Street Common and Great Meadow” that three ferries crossed to Hadley in the eighteenth century. The lowest on the river there, which Walker refers to as Kellogg's, ran between Northampton and Hadley. It was also known as the "south ferry" and operated by the Kellogg family until 1758, and then by Stephan Goodman. A second, the Clark or Clarke ferry, crossed upstream of Goodman's (Kellogg's) from Northampton to the western tip of the Hadley peninsula, at the stage road (now the Bay Path Road). The third ferry, Cook's, ran from Hatfield to the north end of “broad street” in Hadley. [5] Any one or all three of these ferries may have been used by the Convention Army in 1777.
While Anburey mentions crossing the Hudson in a "batteaux" (also spelled bateau or batteau, and though made in a variety of sizes and styles, generally of shallow draft, flat-bottomed and
pointed at one or both ends), river ferries appear typically to have been built with a flat deck and ramps at both ends to accommodate wagons and horses, as well as travelers on foot, as seen above in an image entitled "Market Street Ferry Boat and Landing at Camden, New Jersey in 1779", from the
Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; and here in this incredibly detailed model constructed by John H. Earl, as pictured on his website
"The Model Boatyard".
The British crossing occurred after a day of rest in Northampton. Lieutenant Israel Bartlett, one of the Massachusetts militia guards escorting the column, noted in his diary: “[October] 28 Tuesday. We rested at [North]Hampton all day on account of a very severe storm of rain and snow.”; and “[Oct.] 29 Wednsday. We are ordered to advance in front. We marched [from Northampton] and crossed the river at 10 o’clock, and advanced four miles from Hadley: place called Amherst.” [6] Militia private David How noted similarly: “[October] 28 This Day It has Ben Very Stormy both Hail & Snow and we Staid Hear all Day and Night”; but that he stopped sooner: “[Oct.] 29 This Day we Crossed Coniticut River [from Northampton] and Staid at old Hadley At Night Its ben Wet marching”. [7]
It appears the crossing was uneventful. Lieutenant Anburey makes no mention of it in his letters. British Sergeant Roger Lamb of the 9th Regiment of Foot noted that once across: “Hadley was the first place we arrived at which had any local attractions to delight the eye. It is a pleasant town of Hampshire County, Massachusetts on the east of the Connecticut River. It then consisted of one extensive and spacious street parallel to the river.” [8] As our primary sources for the march of the British column provide no detail on how the crossing was accomplished, we'll look at the German column next week to see how they did it.
[3] Jeffrey H. Fiske and Sally Ostergard Fiske, ed., Journal of Park Holland (New Braintree, MA: Towtaid, 2000), 9.
[4] Alice Morehouse Walker, Historic Hadley (New York, NY: The Grafton Press, 1906), 65.
[5] Patricia Laurice Ellsworth, “Hadley West Street Common and Great Meadow” (University of Massachusetts at Amherst: Masters Project, 2007), 20, 26, 33, 38-39 and 46.
[6] Bartlett, 402.
[7] How, 49-50.
[8] Lamb, Memoirs, 212.
For more on the Convention Army's 1777 march from Saratoga to Boston, see:
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